Three million readers and more bullshit

Xu Jinglei: 3 million readers?

E-magazines have become very popular in China, but nobody exactly knows how popular. Danwei roughly translates a blog entry by Fang Jun of Mind Meters, where we can read how we are being cheated. Circulation figures of most state-owned print media are kept secret, while those of the online competition are obvious false and Fang Jun explains the weasel math:

For example, more than three people visit the California Flannel Pocket Museum every year, but you could say that the museum is in a state that attracts more than 12 million visitors a year. 


And how does a new cable TV station tell people how many viewers it has? Well, they will tell guests to their talk shows that '25 million people can watch you on this show'.

The analysis of the results of one of China's "independent" media research firm is killing:


iResearch [an Internet research firm] has figures about e-magazines, but they are also calculated using weasel math. For example, one of their reports in 2007 predicted that 30 to 40% of all Internet users in China were e-magazine users based on the 'user numbers', so the figures are huge.

E-magazines have become rather popular (although nobody knows how popular) for a set of reasons. Unlike print magazine the e-magazines have been able to avoid up to know the censorship, although the relevant authorities have been making noises that they want to expand their turf also into online publications. That now might a hard to realize.

Of course in production and distribution e-magazines are much cheaper than print publications, while they still have the traditional style of a magazine, while they can use multimedia gadget. That is of course much harder in print editions.